The Gardens That Split India's Only Ape
Hoollongapar Gibbon Sanctuary, home to India's only ape, was cut off from the wider forest by the tea gardens planted around it starting in 1880. A colonial railway line split what was left again. Here is the record, the fifteen-year tree-planting project that grew the animals a way back across, and the electrification plan now threatening that same crossing.
This office certifies tea. It does not certify wildlife policy and has no standing to. But the forest record for Jorhat district is public, and a plain reading of it puts the gardens in the middle of a story about India's only ape. So we will read it plainly, and we will not flatter anybody, including ourselves.
The animal is the western hoolock gibbon, Hoolock hoolock. It is the only ape India has. Not a monkey. An ape, tailless, long-armed, swinging hand over hand through the canopy and calling at dawn in a whoop that carries for a mile. Its densest populations are in Assam, in the same districts this office spends every morning certifying for strength. The IUCN lists it as Endangered. The Indian population is put at roughly 12,000 to 14,000 individuals, and that figure is an estimate, not a measurement. Take it as an order of magnitude and no more.
Now to measure the ground. Hoollongapar Gibbon Sanctuary3 covers 2,098.62 hectares, about 8.1 square miles. Small. You could walk its length before lunch if the undergrowth allowed it, which it does not. It was declared a Reserve Forest in 1881 and named for its dominant tree, the hollong, Dipterocarpus retusus. In 1881 it was not an island. It sat at one end of a continuous forest tract that ran east all the way to Nagaland, and a gibbon born there could travel for days without ever touching the ground.
What closed the door
Assam's own forest department states the boundary plainly, in the state's own language: the sanctuary today sits amid semi-evergreen and evergreen forest, interspersed with tea gardens and human settlements2. Tea gardens began to emerge around the reserve from 1880 onward, and villages followed decades later. Read that against the date of the reserve declaration and the arithmetic is uncomfortable. The forest was protected in 1881. The planting that hemmed it in started almost immediately after, and it was planting, not logging for its own sake. It was this industry. The villages came later and made it worse, but they did not start it.
By the time the place was constituted a wildlife sanctuary in 1997, tea gardens ran the length of its border. What survived inside it is the whole account for that patch of ground: seven primate species (the western hoolock gibbon, the stump-tailed macaque, the rhesus macaque, the northern pig-tailed macaque, the Assamese macaque, the Bengal slow loris, and the capped langur), with a recent count putting the resident gibbon population at roughly 125 animals6.
Then it got cut again.
The line through the middle
A colonial-era railway runs straight through the sanctuary. The Mariani to Dibrugarh line7 splits it into two pieces of very unequal size: roughly 150 hectares (about 370 acres) on one side, roughly 1,950 hectares (about 4,800 acres) on the other. It is a broad-gauge single track5, which on a map looks like a scratch. To a gibbon it was a wall.
Here is the measurement that matters. Gibbons are strictly arboreal. They avoid the ground, and they do not simply hop across a clearing because a human would. Where the canopy stops, the animal stops. A 2006 census found three family groups4 marooned in the small 150-hectare fragment, cut off from 23 family groups in the large one. Three families is not a population. It is a countdown. Without a way across, that side of the tracks was a genetic dead end and everyone involved knew it.
The fix took fifteen years, which is the measurement that matters here too. The regional NGO Aaranyak, working with the Jorhat forest department and the US Fish and Wildlife Service's Great Ape Conservation Fund, proposed the plan in 2004 and by 2006 had begun planting 3,000 saplings of 71 tree species1 along the rail cut, continuing the work for years afterward. Not ornamental planting. The species were chosen for gibbon food and gibbon habitat, and the object was to grow a canopy across the gap and let the animals cross overhead on living wood.
Then they waited over a decade, because that is how long it takes a tree to become a bridge.
The first documented crossing came in 2019. Crossings picked up from January 2021, and in April 2021 a complete family of four crossed from the small fragment to the large one. A forest guard, Heramba Bhuyan, put it as flatly as this office would: "The pace has definitely increased this year." Capped langurs, rhesus macaques and squirrels have been recorded using the same span. Build a road and the traffic finds it.
The part that does not resolve
You will want this to end well. It does not end.
The same 1.65-kilometre stretch of track is now being doubled and electrified7, and that is present tense, not a hundred-year-old entry in a colonial ledger. Dilip Chetri6, a senior primatologist with a wildlife NGO, put the arithmetic of the canopy bridge against the arithmetic of the wire: gibbons live in the canopy and the new line will carry 11,000 volts through it, and a bridge built to solve the crossing does not by itself solve what happens when the crossing is live. The railway's own chief public relations officer confirmed the electric engines are coming once construction finishes. Nobody has said the bridge will be pulled down. Nobody has said the two plans were reconciled either.
And here is the shape of it, which is not a redemption arc. The gibbons are stuck on an island because the plantations made it one. The plantations are also, now, the only thing lying between that island and any other forest, holding ground that any real corridor would have to cross. The rescue that reconnected them took fifteen years to grow and now shares its right of way with a live wire. The tea industry caused one of those two problems and had nothing to do with the other, and a reader looking for one tidy villain will not get one from this office.
So drink the second flush. It is the best black tea in the world and this office will certify that by weight and measure any day you like. Just do not go around saying the gardens are innocent scenery, and do not assume the fifteen-year fix is finished business either. Three thousand saplings took fifteen years to undo one railway cut across 150 hectares. The cut itself is about to be electrified.